Experimental Study of the Solitons in Nonlinear Diatomic Macro-Lattice

For a one-dimensional damped and parametrically driven diatomic-like macro-pendulum lattice, five types of the lower cutoff and upper cutoff stable soliton and kink excitations have been observed. Especially, the gap soliton which has been studied widely in physics is first observed in macro-experiments. The experimental results can be well explained qualitatively by a nonlinear Schrödinger theory after neglecting the nonuniformity effects of the pendulums.